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In what sense may the contributors to this volume be considered “acolytes” either of Lovecraft or of Great Cthulhu? A few were among the elite number to whom Wilson referred, disciples of Lovecraft during his lifetime, apprentices who sought his advice and wrote in his mode. Duane Rimel is one such. His “The Jewels of Charlotte” is an adjunct to his better known tale “The Tree on the Hill,” as well as to his poem sequence “Dreams of Yith,” both of which Lovecraft had a hand in. With the former story this one shares the protagonist Constantine Theunis, and like the latter, it mentions the far-flung planet Yith, his creation, along with Lovecraft. Likewise, Richard J. Searight was another correspondent of Lovecraft and accepted his ideas eagerly. Searight left two unfinished draft fragments of a story he planned to call “Mists of Death,” and his son, Franklyn Searight, a gifted weird fictioneer of the old school, has woven the dangling threads into a complete tapestry his father would have been proud of.
Other writers, without consciously seeking to write in the Lovecraftian vein, nonetheless may be numbered among the acolytes of Cthulhu in that they seem to have been, like the mad sculptor Wilcox, sensitive to the R’lyehian Dreamer’s urgings. They were on the same wavelength as Lovecraft, even if they wrote independently of the Providence recluse. One such was Gustav Meyrink, whose novel The Golem, Lovecraft highly praised. But I am thinking of a different work by Meyrink, “Der Violette Tod.” An English version of the story, “The Violet Death,” appeared in the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Anyone familiar with the original German of Meyrink will recognize that the Weird Tales version is only a kind of loose adaptation, not strictly a translation of “Der Violette Tod.” Thus I have commissioned a new, faithful translation by Kathleen Houlihan, called “The Purple Death.” You will find it most revealing to compare the two English versions. Thanks to Professor Daniel Lindblum for locating the original for me.
Earl Peirce was something of a literary grandchild of the Old Gent, being a protege of Lovecraft’s protege Robert Bloch. In “Doom of the House of Duryea,” Peirce takes a leaf from Bloch’s book. Which book, you may ask? A little volume you may have heard of: De Vermis Mysteriis.
Henry Hasse was another Weird Tales contemporary of Lovecraft who, like Wellman, found the Necronomicon too fascinating a book not to check out of the Miskatonic Special Collections Room. He refers to the dreaded tome in “The Guardian of the Book” (in my anthology Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos) and in the present, admittedly more fannish tale, “Horror at Vecra,” which appeared, appropriately enough, in that premiere Lovecraftian fan magazine The Acolyte for Fall 1943.
In his intriguing essay “Some Notes on Cthulhuian Pseudobiblia” (in S.T. Joshi, ed., H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism), Edward Lauterbach tried to call attention to a neglected Mythos text devised by scientifictionist Charles R. Tanner in his tale “Out of the Jar” (Stirring Science Stories, February 1941), the Leabhar Mor Dubh, or “Great Black Book,” a volume of Gaelic blasphemy. Lauterbach’s voice somehow failed to gain for Tanner the attention he deserved. I hope reprinting the story itself may help remedy that. My thanks to William Fulwiller, who doesn’t miss much, for directing me to the tale.
Another case of novel Mythos tomes which remained obscure despite their inherent juiciness is Steffan B. Aletti’s hellish Mnemabic Fragments, which made a too-brief debut in Aletti’s “The Last Work of Pietro of Apono” (Magazine of Horror #27, May 1969). Aletti’s early work, a quartet of tales all appearing in Doc Lowndes’s magazines, made quite a stir among readers, who readily recognized and acclaimed him as a new standard bearer in the Lovecraft tradition. Until very recently, however, Aletti dropped out of the field, and it is high time his early tales be made available again, lest they become as rare as the Mnemabic Fragments themselves. Three occur here, while the fourth, “The Castle in the Window,” appears in my Chaosium anthology The Necronomicon. I am indebted to Mike Ashley for introducing me to Steffan Aletti’s work.
Another Lovecraftian writer whose reputation is narrower than it ought to be is Arthur Pendragon. This relative anonymity is easily understood, however, for two reasons. First, as far as I know, he wrote only a pair of tales, “The Dunstable Horror” and “The Crib of Hell” (which appeared in Fantastic, April 1964 and May 1965, respectively). Second, he hid behind a transparent pseudonym. As the learned Darrell Schweitzer points out, Pendragon’s secret identity was most likely Arthur Porges, who wrote for the magazine under his own (noticeably similar) name during the same period. Sounds good to me. Let me thank Fred Blosser for putting me onto the two tales of Pendragon/Porges.
In a letter to his friend Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith griped as follows: Edmond “Hamilton, consarn him, has ruined an idea somewhat similar to one that I had in mind, for a tale to be called ‘The Lunar Brain’, based on the notion that there is a vast living brain in the center of the Moon” (March 1932). Does Smith mean that Hamilton, a favorite whipping boy for both CAS and HPL, had ruined the idea by a hackneyed development of it? Or that he had merely ruined the prospect for Smith’s using it, since now it might seem he was copying Hamilton? In any case, Hamilton’s story, included here, has much to commend it, especially from the standpoint of Lovecraftian cosmicism.
Among the acolytes of Cthulhu we must certainly count Professor Dirk W. Mosig and his brilliant disciples S.T. Joshi, Donald R. Burleson, and Peter H. Cannon. All followed Mosig’s lead in their innovative scholarship and critical reinterpretation of Lovecraft’s philosophical outlook, as well as in his experimental attempts to write genuinely Lovecraftian fiction uninfluenced by the Derlethian tradition, some of it tongue-in-cheek, some deadly serious. And then there’s the delightful Derlethian pastiche “The Recurring Doom,” a youthful indiscretion perpetrated by the 17-year-old Joshi in 1975 and reprinted here from Ken Neilly’s premiere fanzine Lovecraftian Ramblings XV (1980).
Robert M. Price
Halloween 1997
DOOM OF THE HOUSE OF DURYEA
BY EARL PEIRCE, JR.
ARTHUR DURYEA, A YOUNG, HANDSOME MAN, CAME TO MEET HIS father for the first time in twenty years. As he strode into the hotel lobby—long strides which had the spring of elastic in them—idle eyes lifted to appraise him, for he was an impressive figure, somehow grim with exaltation.
The desk clerk looked up with his habitual smile of expectation; how-do-you-do-Mr.-so-and-so, and his fingers strayed to the green fountain pen which stood in a holder on the desk.
Arthur Duryea cleared his throat, but still his voice was clogged and unsteady. To the clerk he said: